Robert Kurz

The War Against the Jews

Why the global public is turning against Israel during the
economic crisis

The political reactions to the war in
Gaza show that
the more threatening the military situation for Israel
becomes, the less friends it has. A tectonic shift in
the balance of forces is occurring. It was always the
case that the Middle East conflict was not just a
limited scuffle between regional interests, but rather
an exemplary and ideologically loaded proxy conflict. In the era of the
Cold War, the conflict between
Israel and Palestine was regarded as a paradigm for
the antagonism between western imperialism under the
leadership of the USA and an “anti-imperialist
camp”
for whose leadership China and Russia competed. The
propaganda of both sides ignored the double character
of the state of Israel, which on the one hand was a
normal state within the framework of the world market,
and on the other hand was an answer by Jews to the
eliminatory ideology of exclusion of European and
particularly German anti-Semitism. Israel was
subsumed to a geopolitical constellation into which it
could not be completely absorbed.

After the collapse of state socialism and
the
“national liberation movements” that had formulated
a
program of “belated development” on the basis of
the
world market, the character of this proxy conflict was
altered fundamentally. In place of the secular
developmental regime emerged so-called Islamism, which
only ostensibly operates as a traditional religious
movement. In fact, it is a postmodern culturalist
crisis-ideology of a part of the long since
westernized elites in the Islamic countries, who
represent the authoritarian potential of the
postmodern and who have imbibed the completely
non-Islamic ideology of European anti-Semitism. The
segments of capital in the region that had failed on
the world market declared the war against the Jews to
be an exemplary struggle against western dominance. Conversely, western
crisis-imperialism, with the USA
at its head, made Islamism its new main enemy, after
pampering it during the Cold War and providing it with
weapons.

This new constellation led to ideological
dislocations
of unexpected proportions. Neoliberalism, with its
capitalist war of world order against the “failed
states” of crisis-prone regions and in the Middle
East, appeared to identify with Israel. Since then,
neo-fascist currents throughout the world have lined
up with the anti-semitic Islamist “resistance
struggle”, even while simultaneously fomenting racist
sentiments against immigrants from Islamic countries. A large part of
the global left also began to
unconditionally transfer the glorification of the old
“anti-imperialism” to Islamic movements and
regimes. This can only be described as an act of ideological
neglect, since Islamism is opposed to everything for
which the left ever stood: it persecutes Marxist
thought with merciless oppression and torture, it
punishes homosexuality with the death penalty, and
treats women as second-class people. Traditional
religion is also not responsible for this; rather, it
is the result of a capitalist patriarchy in crisis,
which can also be felt in other ways in the west. The
unholy alliance of the “socialist” caudillismo of
Hugo
Chavez with Islamism merely constitutes a geopolitical
confirmation of this ideological degeneration, which
does not contain any emancipatory perspective.

Since the historically unparalleled
financial crash in
Autumn of 2008, the global constellation is turning
once more. Now it becomes clear that the collapse of
state socialism and the national developmental regimes
was only the surfacing of a giant crisis of the world
market. Neoliberalism is in ruins, and the capitalist
wars of world order are no longer financially viable. In this
situation, it becomes clear that Israel was
never anything more than a pawn on the chessboard of
global crisis-imperialism. Already the Bush
administration had trivialized the Iranian atomic
program. The interests of Israel and the USA are
diverging: Obama no longer has any political-military
room for maneuver. The Islamic war against the Jews
is being accepted. For that reason, the missile
attack by Hamas against Israeli civilians appears
insignificant; the global public overwhelmingly
describes Israel's counter-attack as
“disproportionate”. The Palestinians in
Gaza are
equated as victims with Hamas, as if this government
had not prevailed in a bloody civil war with the
secular Fatah.

Thus the Islamic propaganda concerning a
massacre
against civilians falls on fertile soil. In fact,
Hamas – just like the Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006 –
has
taken the civilian population hostage, while it
converts Mosques into weapons caches and allows its
cadres to open fire from schools and hospitals. Global opinion
overlooks this, since it has already
recognized Hamas as a “force for order” within the
social crisis. For this reason, capitalist pragmatism,
reaching as far as the liberal bourgeois press, is
increasingly turning against Israel's self-defense. This is actually
the secret of the neo-statist turn
during the crash of the global economy: the
impoverished masses should be pacified in an
authoritarian manner: and for that even Islamism is
acceptable, provided it has democratic legitimacy. And a left that no
longer has any socialist aims, and
gloats about the postmodern “loss of all
certainties”
threatens to be absorbed into the authoritarian crisis
management and accept the Islamic war against the Jews
as ideological flanking. The proxy conflict has
achieved an ideological dimension of global
proportions. Against the ideological mainstream, it
must be maintained that the elimination of Hamas and
Hezbollah is an elementary condition not only for a
precarious capitalist peace in Palestina, but also for
an improvement in the social conditions. If the
chances for this are bad, then the chances are good
for global society's descent into barbarism.